Monday, 21 April 2014

Having an abundance of a variety of fresh chillies at our nursery, including tabasco chillies, we decided to try our hand at making Tabasco® Sauce. Deciding that we didn't want to wait 3 years for a small bottle, we modified the method a little bit, as well as the ingredients. The result was delicious.

We made an initial test sauce consisting of tabasco, habanero, sweet thai and possibly some birds eye chillies if I recall correctly. It turned out delicious and although it's very potent we devoured it quickly, so we decided to make a sweet version, and a hot version.

The process is described below.

Ingredients

Sweet sauce ingredients

The sweet sauce consisted of around 200 grams of sweet thai and cayenne chillies. In addition we added 2 tomatoes, an onion, some garlic, about a 1/4 of a cup of sugar and a teaspoon of salt.

Most sweet chilli sauce recipes call for a lot more sugar than this, but we weren't trying to make jam. We want some bite dammit and this sauce sure does have some.

Hot sauce ingredients

For the hot sauce, we amped it up a little, while still keeping it flavorsome because we aren't going for world records here - we want something we can enjoy.

But because we also want to hurt people, we used the three hottest chillies we grow - the ghost, the dorset naga, and 1 carrot chilli. The ghosts are the three on the top right, the carrot is the one that looks like a carrot, and the three dorset nagas are just under the ghosts and look similar, but smaller.

The fat ones are the habaneros and the rest are sweet thai and some birds eye. All up there was just shy of 150 grams of chillies. We also added some garlic, and a teaspoon of salt.

In our opinion sweet thai chillies are a must in any sauce we make because they are so flavorsome. They are very similar to a jalapeno in heat and flavor, but much more 'fruity'.

The carrot chilli is nasty. It doesn't really have much of a flavor but it has a lot of heat.

Vinegar

You will also need some vinegar. We used plain old distilled white vinegar, but almost anything will do. In our first test we used sushi vinegar, and we used a little of that in the hot sauce too.

Method

First thing you need to do is pulverize the ingredients. We did a rough chop first, and then threw it in the blender.

Something to be taken into consideration when blending it, is that it will throw a lot of fine particles into the air - try not to inhale it. This also happens when you wash the dishes used.

After blending into a pulp, put it into a pot and put enough vinegar in it to cover the pulp and then a little more to account for loss from boiling.
Bring the vinegar/pulp mix to a boil and simmer for about 10-20 minutes. The vinegary smell will be gone by this time.

Next pour the slush into a strainer with something to collect the goodness under. Push the juice through the strainer with a big spoon. It takes a little time to get all the juice from it.

All that remains now is to decanter the juice into a bottle or other container. But don't throw the left over pulp away! It's great in chilli con carne or anything like that.

And here is the final product, 2 bottles of sweet sauce and 1 little bottle of facemelter. This should last us a while... maybe.